


The War of Eregion:

by TheLightdancer



Series: The War of the Jewels Against the Elder Queen of the Stars [8]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Eldritch Ainur, F/M, Ilmare is her own warning, People who use the name World-Destroyers unironically are bad news, Terrifying Tolkien, War is cruelty and you cannot refine it, War of the Elves and Sauron
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:48:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 12,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27239815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: Hithlum has fallen and Sinmara of Muspeldor demands the Rings from Celebrimbor, who helped her to forge them. When he refuses, a bitter and vengeful spirit of fire and fury goes to war against the Elves, seeking to burn them from the surface of Arda, as a desperate mariner sails west to the land of Andor to seek aid.War has arisen anew, under a new tyrant who embodies the worst things of the world as it is. And in the fires of Nightfall, a world burns.
Relationships: Celeborn/Galadriel | Artanis, Celebrimbor | Telperinquar/Original Female Character(s), Celebrían/Elrond Peredhel, Tar-Minastir/Tar-Minastir's Wife
Series: The War of the Jewels Against the Elder Queen of the Stars [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1804138
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	1. An Ultimatum at Dawn:

_**The Outer Edges of Eregion, Dawn S.A. 1693, the first morning of Summer:** _

Hithlum had fallen, Nightfall unsheathed and burning with that flame that scourged Dor-Lomin. The Fallen's great lieutenant had returned, risen as from the grave and with dreadful vengeance. The High King of the Elves was dead, their capital burned, though mighty Elven kingdoms endured. In Eregion, in Rivendell, where a new kingdom was forming. The core of what would become Laurelindornean, and the first stirrings of the vast realm of the Greenwood. Mighty kingdoms that had replenished numbers, and grown in what was not quite peace but had not quite been war, either.

They had not known nor cared what had fallen on the East, and in the South. They had not known nor cared to know what lights burned in Mount Doom, what dead rose from graves to walk and burn and ruin all that was for the sake of its existence.

They were denied the luxury of continued ignorance when the monster that had burned Hithlum and left it a guttering ruin, blackened buildings and curious green glass that would endure, ground that sickened and led to strange symptoms, appeared out of a flash of fire before the gates. She was clad in a new and seemingly improved version of her older armor, grown and swollen to twice her old size. Her flesh was dark, and marked with reddish lines showing heat, much as the life-blood of the Earth was. Her eyes blazed a brilliant reddish hue, and from her a heat exuded that wiltered the plants and made the trees cringe and sing and plead for their shepherds. 

A giant stood at the gates and spoke in a voice of thunder and doom:

_**Celebrimbor Ring-Maker! Come forth!** _

Nine times did she shout, and she waited nine days, and then at last, riding with a horse drawn near to exhaustion (and which would be the third killed in the wake of his crossing to the edge of his domain in so short a time) he arrived. He was clad in full armor and his eyes were haunted with anguish at one level and wrath at another. He was the last of the Feanorians, sharing the dark skin of his family and their hulking build, though he seemed a child next to the towering spirit of ruin with her great sword strapped to her back that gazed at him with malice that burned the world around her and made the air impossible to breathe.

_**Hail, son of Curufin, son of Feanor, well met. You and I have made wonders, those little trinkets. The Rings. I demand them, all of them, as my ransom for thy kingdom. I shall grant you nine days to call your sons and to have them bring them.** _

In wrath and anger, in the recognition that Galadriel and his own warnings were right he stood proud before the demon.

"And if I refuse?"

Her right hand went to the hilt of her sword and he flinched.

_**Then Nightfall will leave its scabbard and I shall burn your realm from one end to the other, and from the ashes of your fallen kingdom and Artanis's great works, I shall have them anyway and you shall know this realm withers from you and you alone.** _

_**Nine days, Ring-maker. Bring me my works, or all you love shall burn, and I shall spare you last as my sword burns your family to rotted charred ruins and then, with that odor in thy nostrils, I shall allow you to die last, but not from the blade.** _

"Go to Hell!"

The creature laughed long and uproariously, peals of menacing thunder echoing, as she leaned down and slapped her thigh, tears of fire weeping down her cheeks.

_**Hell is but a word, boy. Reality is much worse.** _

Then she vanished in that clap of fire and the ground remained withered, the imprints of her boots burned in where she had stood.

He turned to the servant of Lord Celeborn and Lady Galadriel, Queen of this realm in power though not yet in name as she would become in Laurelindornean in the future.

"Go to them. Tell them that war is come. Unless they order me to give the rings, I shall not. She shall have to come and pry them from my burned dead hands."

The courtier nodded and mounted his own horse and was off.

Celebrimbor stood for a time, fists clenched, thoughts moving at a great pace. The Utumnonatari lived. Galadriel's experience in the woods, her ambush and attempt to kill the girl-child Arwen Arien, all of these things meant terrible times had come.

"My grandfather and my father were monsters, but I am not. I will show that there is one person of our lineage, at least, who can do more than sow ruin in his wake."

And with a deep sad sigh he turned back and strode into the vast expanses of Eregion, where this time he would take multiple horses and trust in his gifts that he could get closer to where he needed to be in time.

War had come, and a demon's wrath was always a terrible thing to behold.


	2. Dealing Death to the Worlds:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nine days lapse as Sinmara of Muspeldor rallies her armies to her side. 
> 
> The Elven leaders call conclave by Osanwe and a fateful decision is made. 
> 
> In Numenor, on the Meneltarma, a King gives orders.

**_The Meneltarma, Numenor:_ **

It was not the capital of Numenor, that was the great city of Adunie, the mightiest and most splendid of all the cities in a mighty and a splendid land. Long had the inhabitants of this land delved into secret and hidden arms, and much had been achieved by them. From early on as with the Dwarves they had mastered the arts of automatons, devising them with small bits of Song derived from the secret lore of Kemenros Tar-Minyatur, founder of the great land. Then, in the reign of Tar-Anarion, a blend of Song and of machinery had brought forth new wonders.

Of all the manifold wonders of Westernesse of old, its Analytical Engine would be the greatest. The realms of Gondor and Arnor, its remnants, held to but a dim shadow of the old glories with the mystic arts of the Palantiri, the Far-Seers, gems empowered by Song and part of a greater web of things that under King Tar-Minastir were taking their first steps to glory. It had been he who had seen the merit of blending elements of the Analytical Engine with the Automatons, and with expansion of the arts thereof. Long had Automatons freed the inhabitants of Numenor from all save elements of tilling the soil and growing crops, a thing that could and did become a burden shared by all of society in the wake of the great changes.

From Kemenros they had inherited long lifespans, the first king had lived five hundred years, and the longest of all the first general, old Metelshezzar, still lived at nearly nine hundred and sixty nine years. He was not senile, nor had he clung to life, but rather he lived it in joy, and he awaited too, the so-called Gift of Men with joy too. Metelshezzar was a strange one, wise as his years indicated, and yet.....

It was he who reacted most strangely when flashes of light were visible from the far east and the Great Lands, and it was he of them all who locked himself up most firmly when the cloud cover was thinnest. Tar-Minastir had come to the Meneltarma to commune with the Allfather, for here the clouds were always thickest and the mountain had more greenery than most true mountains would. Here the work of the Lord of the Forge and the Wood-Queen for whom their ancestor was named was at its apex, a signal of their love and of the blessings of the Lords of the West at their highest level. Each part of the mountain was consecrated to one or another of the Valar, the symbolism of Melkor and Manwe intertwined at its top. A statue in the form of a great eagle, talons extended, beak open in a shriek of wrath that almost seemed to be a living object.   
  
And for the Great King a throne of obsidian-hued iron, where the King sat and sought his communion. Many were the gifts of Kemenros's line, many the gifts of the blood of Melian, the Star-Shield, one of the mightiest of all Ainur. The most basic that all in Westernesse shared was a kind of prescience, a set of visions of the future and the kinds of forks it could pursue. In truth sifting what would be truth from the non-truths was where the art remained one. Prophecy and foresight was a tricky thing, especially with Men to whom there was less of a set path than others. Yet here, all visions of all in Westernesse, those whose glimpses were but tiny flashes without a context, those who could see moments, and those like the royal family and the highest nobility to whom the future and its paths were unfolded like a gallery of options and each chose to pursue what they would, converged. 

A ship would come, sailing west, with a desperate overture. An overture that the Land of Andor return to the east, where the first colonies had quite literally burned in fire when the demon-queen of Muspeldor had raised her sword and all had burned. Since then the forges and armories had worked overtime, deeds done by Men, not by their automaton-servants. New armor, with small wards provided from the lore of Kemenros, new weapons. Things of the First Age modified for heavier puncturing power and more rugged reliability. The palace guard wielded finer weapons that required much more maintenance. If soldiers were to go east, they would need a weapon rugged enough to drop into mud for a week, pick it up, and to work with minimal difficulty.

These were simple matters. Constructing a fleet to take an army to the East, with room for the logistics and the men without being too heavy or too cumbersome, had taken more time but it had been deciphered, too. These were the Turtle Ships of Numenor, ships with wooden keels and rudders and armor of iron that no weapon short of the dreadful star-sword that could only be faced with the knowledge that a heroic death was the best to hope for, could strike through. And now this. He had seen the vision, the Elf-mariner would be leaving the port, soon. He would be ready, and he would need to ensure his nobility would march with sensibility, not the hubris that the Land of Gift could face a monster that had slain the Umbar colony to the last Man and left only poisoned ground and bleached bones to tell the tale.

Quiet words were spoken to his sentries, who waited at the port at the easternmost end of the land of Andor, where the King in turn rode on a great destrier, taking time to rest his animal. When the Elf arrived, he would be waiting, for the great iron hands of the Weaver were drawing them at last into the warp and weft of the world.

Quietly too he murmured to himself: "Umbar shall be avenged."

\---------

_**Conclave of the Elf-Lords:** _

It was a desperate gesture to speak to so many with Osanwe, yet it was a thing made possible by the superlative power of Kemenrond, son of Earendil the Mariner, by whom so much good would arise in this and in later times. The High King was dead, and with him the last of the old potential claimants in the male line. All looked to Galadriel, she who had been Artanis, the great survivor to take the throne but not yet would she do so. For now, in her own city, knowing that soon she would remove herself to the core of what would become Laurelindornean, she listened to the tempests of thoughts and emotions.

The High King was dead and the most hot-headed vowed for vengeance, to complete the deeds that had been done and that partially by Luthien Tinuviel. The more fools they, for only one there was who was destined to be the doom of the Hell-Queen of Muspeldor and she was too young for war and the waging of war. None gave a counsel of despair, though she, along with others, kept their counsel, waiting on decisions that had to be made and words spoken by the great Ring-Maker.

He too had listened for a quarter-hour to the anger and the divided counsels of the remaining Elven nobility, before finally speaking in a decisive voice that rippled outward, one that only Galadriel, Celeborn, and Kemenrond could listen to without feeling overwhelmed by.

_The monster wants war. There are no peaceful options. Were the Rings to be given to her she would take them and then put each and every part of our constructions here in Eregion to the sword. All other options must reflect upon this reality. War has come, a war where there is only desperate hope and heroism against a foe who will show neither pity nor mercy, who will not rest until the last skull of the last Elf is fallen into a barrow._

_We must fight, and we cannot do it alone. I have sent a ship to the West._

Kemenrond spoke, softly. _The Valar will not send more armies, not after the devastation of the War of Wrath. Beleriand fell into the ocean when last they came. The two Maiar in the East, they are the help they have sent directly. And we know little to nothing of what passes there beyond that they have come and they have gone._

Celebrimbor spoke, calmly. _I do not intend to call on the Lords of the West. I am sending the ship to your relative Tar-Minastir, King of Andor._

There was mutual surprise among the Elves. 

_Andor is a strange land, but it is where we can seek a help and a strength that should take the Hell-Queen by surprise._

Galadriel spoke, then, her voice firm in thought as it was not, always, in flesh. 

_They have come to the east a few times, Lord Celebrimbor. Their biggest colony she destroyed with that sword of hers. Why do you believe that if they failed then, they would succeed now?_

The clamour stilled as Celebrimbor answered the question confidently: 

_We cannot stop her, the individual, or her sword. The armies she leads, however, are far from invincible, and as mighty as she is. She has built them for a reason, if her armies can be broken....._

The Elven leaders 'turned' in the language of thought to she who had become in truth Queen, if not yet willing to use the title. 

_Your decision is brave and logical both. Well reasoned, and well done. Our armies shall move all the same, as it will take them longer to move to the east than it did or will her to drive north. She moves overland with armies that she is gathering as we speak, they have to complete their fleet._

Silence fell again.

_Celebrimbor is right all the same, war is here. The soldiers best suited, and most courageous to lead an army in the field must do so, otherwise? Dig in, fortify towns. Make th foe bleed. Each life lost will make the task of Numenor easier when its soldiers come. For my part I shall move my realm east, as foreseen, but only after this war. It is not suiting that the first deed of the one you wish to lead you be to flee the onslaught of a foe who all logic says cannot be beaten._

She felt their determination, and then a single wave of thought echoing: 

_We march for Ost-in-Edhil!_

**_Outskirts of Eregion:  
_ **

There remained seven days since she had sent her ultimatum to the Elves of this land. Seven days for her armies to trickle in the last arriving detachments, for her to form them up into a command structure. She was the general who would lead her forces in the field. Her right would be led by Elladan, elder son of Elrond, who would earn his name 'the Defiler' in the course of this war. She would personally direct the center, where armies of Rhun and Harad formed the bulk of it, corset-staved by companies to regiment-scale forces of Jotnar, and by Eldar officers.

The left would see a heavy contingent of Warg-cavalry, already beginning their task of screening her armies from the conventional sights of the Elves.

In truth it mattered not what Celebrimbor did, if he turned in the Rings as she demanded them she would kill him slowly as a traitor to his people would deserve, if he refused, she would decapitate him and then use his headless body as one of her symbols.

These were smaller legions than her mother had led, just shy of a million troops, and the logistical task to support these troops would be immense, and would heavily tax the region. That part didn't matter so much, when the war began her armies would sunder, each wing stalking off on its own, marching to lay waste and ruin to Eregion on the whole. But first, Ost-in-Edhil, city of Galadriel, where she would lay low the last of the royal lineage and her works.

Nightfall remained in its scabbard and outwardly she patrolled the camp, at one point briefly moving it from the scabbard to burn alive Orcs too incautious about severing their shit from their areas to drink, otherwise keeping it on her back. Seven days, and Galadriel would fall, and the leaderless Elves picked off one by one. Last of all the daughter of Kemenrond, rumored to be the one who would be her doom.

Seven days.

She was of the Choir of the Ainur that had sung the world into existence, empowered as one of the greatest of the Valar in brute force. Hers was a sword to obliterate realms, if so she chose.

This would be more massacre than war, but then the best wars were. Only fools enjoyed a contest of equals.


	3. Gods and Monsters:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sinmara has hallucinations as her armies muster. 
> 
> Ost-in-Edhil braces itself for the coming onslaught.

FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE STORM BREAKS, OBSIDIAN THRONE OF MUSPELDOR:

Sinmara found herself on her throne, brought there by means that she did not fully grasp. She had _changed_ since power had flooded through her. She grasped elements of gifts shared by other Ainur, even if she could not attain true mastery in any of them. The realms of the Feanturi, the Lords of Souls and Dreams, she could _see_ them and to a partial degree _wield_ them. It was heady power, the kind that flowed through the realities of Melkor, Great King of all Arda, and of his faithful lapdog Mairon. She had been mighty as it was, the mightiest of all the Maiar, and the most powerful. Even in the small glimpses she had seen of a being of utter darkness illuminated by bright blue stars, eyes blazing like her own she was. Then she would bestride battlefields and in the weight of gravitational forces and fire shatter a continent.

Now she was mightier still. As mighty not merely as the lesser of the Valar, but their greater. A match in raw power for the Lord of the Seven Winds and the Mistress of Woods and the Lord of the Forge. Singly, she could overawe any of their spheres absolutely with writ unhindered. Together they were beyond her power, and the nature of that power. Melkor, had in some impossible scenario he fallen instead of her mistress, he might have been able to match them altogether, but she could not. She did not need to do so, in truth, she reflected. True mastery of a thing was not in the ability to wield it to create, but in an inexorable flowing power of magma that no force could lay low. What destroyed a thing had the greatest power over it, and in that sense her power was growing.

Ost-in-Edhil would be besieged by her armies, her new gifts showed her. Long and bitter battles fought at its gate, the last of the Feanorians and the lickspittle thrall of Melian the Traitor granted great arts that would match her legions. That would not matter. She did not need to bring its fall, it would become a siege and that was a matter of time, time and the weight of armies that favored her. What use holding a city if the realm around it was smashed? Against arts that Elves had never truly faced, the fullness of her new power, of forces that made her the Life-Bane, the foe of what was and would be, what was their nature?

Perhaps the legions of the distant Land of the Gift, but it was centuries removed from the concerns of the Great Lands. There was a further paradox there as well, a bloodline that could partially cloud her sight. But one thing was clear to her, an image of a woman, fair and beautiful, the fairest of that land. Hair dark as night, body voluptuous and lips like rubies, pale as marble. Eyes of near-supernatural power and entrancing effect. And a name.

_**Miriel.** _

The name slipped from her mouth. A daughter of the Peredhils, last of her line, interwoven with a terrible Doom. She knew of the prophecy and yet the very proximity she had faced to Arwen Arien had left her bemused. Somehow, the child had escaped her. No matter, a thing that hid was not a threat.

Clouded vision and a strangeness of the vast Star-Island were her challenges, as was the understanding of just what she saw. The knowledge was bewildering, and having the sight did not equal the means to wield it well. Visions of beings like the Second-Born but wielding great power, one dark and rich brown with eyes that shone, one paler and ginger-haired with a wild frenzy. Beings of great power and spells who worked against her will, agents of turmoil and thorns in her flesh. Thorns that would not matter if the great lands to the North fell.

Valusia, rising to its first epoch of greatness, and troubled by the ease with which Nightfall had pierced its frontier, by the ease with which servants of its ranks had joined her vast legions. Its first great Emperor, Yig-Adornu, already attaining his throne and preparing his own legions to march against the Hellblade of the North.

The teeming lands to the south, Far Harad, a realm of vastness with people darker-skinned than the Maia in mortal guise. A place of mighty kings and bold heroes, who absent the gifts of the Valar had worked with a surprisingly vast number of the Avari against her legions, whose footholds were small and weak. The realm of Sahul, where the most divergent Avari worked with the lords of humanity, it had purged its lands of her mistress's servants and was beginning a drive north, its Emperor, Kanmare, the self-proclaimed Rainbow Snake, Lord of the Dreamtime, declaring himself the liberator of the Four Corners. 

And there were the humans who had taken the name of the Choir, the bearded men of the East, lords of Bear-cults led by Bear-flesh changers. These Ainu of the Rising Sun...she would march to the east after the fall of Ost-in-Edhil and driving the Elves to the Sea. She would march, and these False Ainu would burn. But for now.....

She brooded on a throne that she had found herself on after being seemingly in her camp.

Then the Path of Dreams seemed to steal on her unawares or perhaps a trace of the sight that her mother had taken for granted and that was seldom given to her.

Darkness fell, unrelenting and absolute and cold, so very cold. Ainu did not feel cold, even in mortal frames that were seemingly so but not truly so, and Ainu of the Stars still less. Yet her body trembled and her breath misted, frost riming her throne. The darkness was redolent with the aura of dead empires and vanished kingdoms and a terrible malignancy and a deep and abiding Hunger, and a sense of keen eyes that watched from Beyond intruded. She shivered again. In the past, chained by her mother's throne she had seen a terrible thing striding to the throne and heard a dual voice hissing lies and hatred, her mother snarling defiance and pride against a terrible and malevolent force that stalked from beyond the stars.

She saw _a thing that moved toward her with eyes that gleamed like dead stars, a swollen and malevolent thing that glowed with a terrible light, a sick and filthy thing that made even her mother's stars seem hallowed and worship-worthy things. It was immense, the same giant that she had 'seen' before. It seemed to fill the throneroom and to look at her with a contemptuous gaze that made her snarl defiance in turn, reaching for the hilt of Nightfall. Dual-voiced laughter thundered._

_**The Star-Kindler pledged to me that she would exceed me and now she rots beyond the Doors. And here, what is there? A little lost child, soul torn and mutilated, grasping to dying dreams and feverish failures, alone and unwanted. Given the chance to repent but too weak for that. Given the power of Gods and too weak for that, too. You wished to die in those woods, and for that, too, you were too weak.** _

_**You believe yourself a spirit of fire and what are you?** _

_**Lost and shivering in cold. A ruler of a great kingdom of emptiness vowing to scourge a world in fire and so mad you are on a throne that was never yours.** _

_The giant moved, its tread echoing with sounds like a thunderclap. Each booming step seemed to draw it closer, its head crowned by a great ridge covered in brilliant straw-hued hair._

_**A little lost child, scorned and unloved, the last scion of a fallen people.** _

_Sinmara growled, and then drew her blade as the thing that seemed to gaze at her laughed again, mocking her with a sound that tried to flay her like knives coated in salt. Dull knives._

**_No gods! No masters! I am Sinmara, destroyer of worlds!_ **

_Nightfall blazed in fire and the hallucination snarled and seemed to reach for her, only for Sinmara to roar in a bestial sense akin to the thing she'd seen in her darkest imaginations, visions of worlds that could never be and would never be. The blaze became incandescent and the thing seemed to shatter and dissolve in a spray of shrapnel that left her cut to r-_

She was in her camp, alone, wearing golden armor. Yet her blade was out in front of her, blazing with its heat as her tent had dissolved into ashes around it. She shook her head. Her mother was mad. She had made her anew in her image yet she would not fall to-

She felt a sharp pain in her shoulder and the fires faded from Nightfall as the blade slid back in its scabbard. She groaned in pain as she removed something from her pauldron, coated in iridescent Ainu-blood.

It was a fragment of dark green armor that in her sight magnified by gifts of the Feanturi seemed made of screaming faces on faces on faces, each howling in agony, longing for death but unable to d-

Fires blazed from her hand and the shard crumbled into ash that blew away.

She snorted with contempt.

_**Varda was weak, Varda was a fool.** _

The words slipped from her mouth as she felt a great temptation to draw her blade and burn her armies and then storm the vast Elven realm single-handedly, just moving as a single-minded destroying force.

The temptation grew and as the bleeding injury healed and her armor seemed to grow back in an organic fashion, she moved her hand away from her blade with a sudden huff of pained triumph. Her mother was weak, it was why she had remade her in her image. The Star-Kindler was weak, but she?

She looked at her golden gauntlets. Four days, four more days for the last of her legions to move. Then the Siege of Ost-in-Edhil would begin.

Yes, she could and she would march with her sword blazing and Elven cities would burn, but the maker of the Rings had made a Ring for himself, and with those Rings came power over the Song, channeled and wielded within as much tolerance as immortal and Elven flesh could bear. One on one they were weaker than she was, but one of them, she suspected, belonged to the great-grandson of Luthien, and such power given to one of that lineage together with the rest meant that she would be beaten, as a bear would be beaten by hounds. And yet against her flames as Elven woods and works burned, they would draw the Rings together, and more to the point, she would coax out of her cage the thrall of the Traitor.

Galadriel, she called herself now. Hair turned white in a single lock from the torments of the Feanorians and what they had nearly done to her. A wondrous figure and haunted by fearful dreams. A cruel smile came to her face. Her power in the Soul-realms was growing, and one did not need to rule Lorien's realm to wield it for great harm, Merely to haunt it, to make even the secret hours of the night a fearful and restless thing. Deny the Quendi rest and they would make mistakes.

There were possibilities now, great things she could do, her native power enhanced.

Awash in them, she re-raised Nightfall and then as the sword blaze she howled curses in Valarin at her foes, and the small portions grasped dimly by hands that had never quite been meant to bear them carried the curses as snarls and howls on a blazing wind that scorched through the woods. Let the First-born of the Allfather tremble.

Four days.

And they would burn first, and then the false Ainu, then like a thunderbolt she would drive from the Steppe to fall upon Valusia, Far Hard, and Sahul. And when all was ashes, Andor next, and last Valinor.

\--------

OST-IN-EDHIL:

Armies were gathering and moving with full Elven speed, clad in mail and wielding swords enhanced by fell runes meant to waken them to great slaughter. A small fraction of the armies of the glory days of the Siege of Angband, when they had wielded the dragon-staves that spat fire, and the great volcanic engines of ruin that echoed with fire and fury and wrecked the very land itself, chewing it with the merciless hunger of a draconic force. Yet their foe was not the Star-Kindler, and her legions were savage, yet what was clearly their first incursions had seen horrific atrocities unleashed....yet they were broken by swords and axes.

And there were the secret weapons, the lesser and greater Rings. One given to Galadriel, the Ring of Adamant, one to Kemenrond a ring of Water. One to Cirdan, by secret means. And a last Great Ring, one that would pass unknown after his fall, to his rival and be kept as a memento of that fall. The Ring of Water granted knowledge, to one already a worthy heir to Galadriel even if not of her blood. In that gift he had almost heard a loom at work, the fabric woven into the pattern of the Weaver's make, that dance of fate that would have and did ensnare them all in the Allfather's great dream.

The Rings granted Power, dominion over the material sphere. A means to at least partially wield the kind of power wielded by the Enemy against the Enemy, to fight Power with Power. Against a foe who wielded a sword that had slain the High King and burned him and his palace to ashes, and with him wrecked everything in the far north bar perhaps the Havens themselves, it would require all of this and more. Armies were gathering, restrained by the fearsome might and majesty of the dreadful demon they called lord. The Pale Horse, she called herself, a symbol of the Grave.

And, too, she still went by the name that was her sigil of mockery of the Elves. Aurelian, for that name rippled outward from the camp, chanted along with her first name, the name given her when she was not yet fallen into the terrible demon that waited beyond the forest.

A hot wind scourged Ost-in-Edhil as orders were given, and as the women and children, minus Galadriel herself, were placed within the carefully hidden Warrens beneath the city. A place of safety, if safety there was. The hot wind echoed with malice, curses in a fell and booming voice, a thing of raw power that seemed to cut the air much as the malevolent fire from that blade flowed like liquid and scourged and mutilated the very soul itself.

Baying cries in a harsh and guttural tongue, that which later generations under the influence of the great Sorcerer John Dee, the 007 of Queen Elizabeht would call Enochian and which to the Elves was Valarin, the wind roared and snarled words that he, with his family and his heritage understood. Galadriel did, too. Were Kemenrond here, or his now-deceased brother, they too would have grasped it. Snarled curses upon the bones of the Elves and of their children and of their grandchildren, the promise that those who lived would face the light and mercy of the stars and be reborn above good and evil.

Promises that Nightfall would scourge woods as it had the High King.

A demon lurked beyond the woods, a demon whose legions were vast and which chanted from time to time.

_Aurelian Aurelian Aurelian!_

_Aurelian Aurelian Aurelian!_

_Sinmara! Aurelian!_

The dogs of war howled and bayed in the woods, waiting for a sword of fire to release them, stoked to a fever pitch, and armies of Elves moved through the woods, aided by strange shadows that crept at night and creaked with fell things and malice. 

It seemed at times that against the fell fires of Nightfall that shadows at night and even in the day were darker and trees bayed with hunger and malice for blood, to avenge their fallen cousins destroyed by Nightfall and the Star-Kindler.

If that were true, it was no great comfort in itself. Huorns were monsters as dangerous to the Free Peoples as to the Enemy. The Woods of the Wood-Queen versus the fires of the Star-Kindler, in a battle for the West like none other.

Celebrimbor was not quite the last King or potential king of his people. His sons Maglor and Maedhros, named after his uncles, and his daughters Nerdanel and Luthien, named after his grandmother and after she who had not quite slain the monster that lurked beyond the woods but had dealt her lasting wounds around the throat, they were his hope. Yet as he gave orders and his Ring hummed with the Song within it, he saw a vision of _himself on a throne, grey-haired and withered, a failing king of a dying dynasty, and his throne atop a boneyard of bleached and burned skeletons_ ,

He shook his head and the vision passed. War called, and he was preparing to meet that call.


	4. 'And I looked and I beheld a red horse and its rider.'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The War of the Elves and Ilmare begins.

_The Day of Flames:_

In the future this was the name that it would come to be called. A Day of Flames. A poetic and yet clinical element, when the vast legions of Muspeldor and its immense realms to the east and the south began their long and bitter war with the Elves of Eregion and the Dwarves of Khazad-Dum, who rallied to their side. A description that heralded a point where in the small hours of the morning as Arien cast red light that shone with a bloody hue, a set of trumpets echoed with a roiling clarion call, a single crystalline sound that cracked the sky and smote the air, a sound familiar to those who had heard and endured the terrible wars of Beleriand but forgotten in the lapse of time and of space. 

Once, the sound echoed, then three more times. At the vanguard of her armies stood a gigantic being clad in golden armor, her power that still seemed new even after all this time enhanced by the deadly Ring on her finger. Her hand grasped a great sword with its pommel wrought into fine jewelry, her lips curving into an over-wide leer. Nightfall always felt proper like this, her fearsome and terrible creation, a blade that burned with the heat of a captive star wrought in finest might, metal that summoned into it the power of a star, the kind of power that only she could wield safely.

It was adorned by the runes she had so painstakingly worked with fingers that blazed like torches, shaping the metal and permitting it to wield the flames without becoming brittle and useless. Even without its light Nightfall cut more potently than a blade should, and hit with a kind of concussive force more like a hammer than a blade at other times.

Her mother had led the first great war, and in those fires her armies had known reverses. She knew hers would as well, one did not fight war with an unbroken string of victories. Yet now, it was not her mother who was the great guiding spirit of all that opposed the Great Kingdom of Melkor (and if the stars in their courses laughed and sang that offerings would be made to the spirit of the one beyond the Doors she did not let herself hear this nor acknowledge it). She had led the first and she had fought in those wars, waging battles according to her mother's strategies. Nearly bleeding to death in the woods, her throat torn by the savaging of a gigantic hound that had slavered for blood and gained what it wished for, oh yes, so it did.

Huan was gone now, the traitor-queen was gone now, too. As were most of her wretched brood.

She had seen something strange in her visions. A being of pale skin and dark hair and eyes that were grey like thunderclouds. The Bane of the Gods, by whose presence the transformation of the world from an age of visible magick and power to one of invisible things and the presence of Old Gods that were older than Arda itself who had nourished themselves on its wars, perhaps. Or perhaps not. Her visions were unclear and though her new gifts gave her access to parts of spheres they seldom gave true precision. She had faced that being once in the woods and there had been nothing there, mere luck. Her blade could have ended it all then. 

The red light of Arien spilled across her armies and then her eyes burned with a brilliant light and she held her blade, fire rippling out from the runes like a liquid, forming a blazing light that withered the ground before it, Grass caught fire, and so did the trees ringing Ost-in-Edhil, though the power of the Rings within it meant a great dome of light formed against her blade. The trees that burned carried with them voices that did not scream as one might expect but almost seemed to laugh.

_The Huorns are coming._

She laughed triumphantly, the horns of war echoing once again in their menacing howls, and then she brought her blade down and a sudden arc of fire lanced out and whipped into the outskirts of the great fortress. Its wards were powerful and she would never have Mairon's gift to so neatly shatter wards (and how she admired what he could have been. Gorthaur the sorcerer, but that would not be and she did not truthfully want it to be). No matter. Her armies would march and lay siege, and indeed they were beginning to do so, the infantry marching and beginning to dig lines and saps and traverses, the dragoons riding into the forests and setting themselves up as flank guards. 

This would be a war over a grand region, but one where her foes could come from multiple directions. She would burn the forests around Ost-in-Edhil, leave it a citadel bare beneath the light of her mother's stars, let the star-song do its own part of the work. She would send her great armies as the siege lines were set to burn and to ravage, for war was cruelty and it was death. It was blades in the dead of night beneath the stars that hewed throats and severed heads, the wailing of women pleading for the lives of their infants, the cruel smiles when the pleas failed.

This too was war, and the Elves would have all of of it they could choke on and more besides.

Spades fell and dirt moved, lines moving with skill and the terror of her presence as the forest burned and the pall of smoke provided its own shield and its own shade in what was otherwise a day that even absent her blade would have been scorching hot. Eighteen hours later the siege lines were prepared, and she spoke wielding her new gifts not into the ears of her servants but into their very souls:

_Ride, my hounds of Hell. Scourge and burn, kill, and maim. Leave the devastation such that nothing will dare look askance at a soldier of Muspeldor!_

The hounds of Hell in question bayed and thirsted for blood, chanting her new name as her sword pointed them north and west. 

The hooves of their horses pounded beneath the cloud of smoke.

Her artillery, catapults and mangonels began the first set of strikes against the wards of Ost-in-Edhil in the last hours of darkness, only a few strikes meant to be more derisory than otherwise.

And then night fell, and the stars in their courses sang and echoed in glee at the thought of more blood spilled and offerings made. The night sang its chorus, and the Elves retreated within their homes, even with the army ringing them and the catapults firing. Even with soldiers who tended to sleep during the day and sough the hunger of the stars at night starting to skulk in the woods to find the unwary to claim and to destroy them for the eyes and approval of the Hell-Queen.

Blood was shed that night, the blood of a dozen Elves and just under that number of Men who had not expected after days of tension that the armies would finally move, let alone that they would do so at night. They could hear the stars thirsting for their blood, hear the flowing hissing sound of the Milky Way.

The stars drank well that night, even as Nightfall was in its scabbard and the Hell-Queen remained in a tent slightly distant from the Siege. The lines were set, the forest burned, the artillery fired.

From here, it would become a matter of time and of cruel arithmetic, as it was for all sieges.


	5. The Forest Goes to War:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Huorns attack the ranks of Sinmara's armies outside Ost-in-Edhil. In the aftermath she decides to unleash Nightfall and to begin to wage the siege by a much simpler and crueler means.

_The Lines Outside Ost-in-Edhil:_

It had been a decision welcomed with a lack of comprehension strengthened by utter fear when Sinmara of Muspeldor had marched her armies to the gates of the city, sending her cavalry to harry and to harrow the edges of the forest. Trees were sundered, and those so unwary as to be within the outskirts of the forest were captured and then taken to have their blood spilled before the eyes of Ost-in-Edhil, the water of life to suit the thirst and the hunger of the eternal stars. And yet she had not brought the greater portion of her strength in a broader sense yet, even as darkness not of her making nor of her mother's grew on the right flank. 

She did not know much of the Onodrim, those beings called the Ents by Men and by others of the Great Lands, nor did she particularly care. They were creations, among the greatest creations, of Kementari, who was in most respects among their most tenacious and willing of foes. She would not have known the gulf between those beings that were shepherds of trees, those beings called Jotnar in later tales and by later stories. Not then, and not until later.

Nor did she know until that morning, on the second day of the siege, when Arien had arisen and cast her bloody hues as her servants continued lobbing stones and severed skulls at Celebrimbor's citadel, what it was to face the other kind of the Onodrim, those Ents who had become as trees and trees that had become willful and malicious. Many were their resentments and their hatreds, stored up in aspects from the Dawn-Time and the casual cruelty with which she and her mother had burned and broken the world heedless of what lurked in and within the forests. Huorns, they were called, fearsome things.

Proof that Evil itself did not need to exist to create the Dark, and that the Dark was wild and it was fearsome.

The Forest came in the rays of dawn, the bloody light interweaving with the darkness. It slammed into her right flank where some of her most ferocious riders had harried the trees, and it ripped clean through her armies in a terrible day of battle that she stared at with incomprehension as mighty as all save those in its path, where the trees were alive and had faces that gleamed with malice and hate, jaws that clenched and branches that ripped and tore and rendered asunder.

The artillery fired, but it had struck at the city, not the Huorns, and the Huorns that had struck had seemed to fade into the forest.

For a time the artillery did cease to fire when the devastation wreaked brought a pause to the armies of Muspeldor, for a swathe had been cut in a bloody and a terrified fashion and the mutilated chunks of the bodies of the dead had played havoc with the morale in the ranks. Even Star-Madness against the unleashed wrath of the Kementari's creations and the sheer horror of what the Kementari's wrath could unleash.

There was a lull of a few days in the siege, and then Sinmara regathered her armies and decided if the forest would defy her thus that she would show it that she could not be intimidated.

The Ring-forger had weapons of power in his citadel, and it would take time and starvation to do their work and bring about its fall. Her sword could, she mused, as she drew it from its blade to take the next step, end the whole siege now, and simply eradicate the entire citadel of the Ring-forger and all that was in it.....at the price, potential and otherwise, of destroying the Rings and Ring-lore. She did not want that, and so she was held in a tension. Great power, but where it could help her most, it would help her least.

\------

_For a moment she was in the Palace of Eternal Night, where a withering giant of light and terrible burning energy that seared into the heart of the soul itself looked down at her and smiled, coldly and cruelly._

**_Burn them all, my child. No life is worth living, and none of its fruits worth preserving. You have your Ring. Destroy the rest. Leave none, lest they sow a power that can turn against you._ **

_A withered hand that gleamed with hellish light grasped her with a grip that felt thin, like what was and wasn't bone dug into her chin and she saw the face twistedly akin to her own looking at her with an aristocratic sneer. so  
_

**_Make me proud, daughter of my blood, flesh of my flesh. Burn the world, my Erinti. But do not dignify the ways of my father's creations. Mortals are an obscenity, not a thing to wield to bargain with._ **

\------

She blinked. No, she was here. She touched her jaw. No physical sensation of touch but the one in the soul....

She shuddered.

_**Ost-in-Edhil will fall by the slow means of siege. There are things there that cannot merely be burned and destroyed. Not in Ost-in-Edhil.** _

Then she turned to begin giving orders.

Each of them given, and each of the riders that took the order saluting her and saddling on horses, waiting until the coming of nightfall, so that the star-chorus would bless their deeds. Other orders were likewise given and the day spent in preparations on the one hand, and the steady impact of siege engines, works of science and of magick alike on the other.

It took hours for the orders, once given, to ripple through, for the new sense of cohesion to strengthen, and when it did she raised her blade and ignited it as the Sun set and the Moonlight took its place.

A new dawn came, stoic and cruel and terrible, lit by the light of Nightfall.

_**Ost-in-Edhil will fall to the slow work of siege, but the realms around it shall burn! Ride forth my hounds of Hell! Kill anything that moves, and if you find the Peredhils and their lineage, bring them to me. Alive and unharmed.** _

The horns of the armies of Muspeldor echoed with a rolling clamor that disturbed the sleep of those who had sought to try find it amidst the terrors of the siege that weren't already awakened by the False Dawn. Their horses rode off, the riders blowing their horns again in a great clamour and other armies digging more deeply in the lines around the siege as their mistress brought her blade down again in an arc of fire that set light to the woods around Ost-in-Edhil, and to her own deeper pleasure to the few outer gardens beyond the walls of the city that sustained its ability to feed itself. 

None slept well in the city that night, between the false dawn of Nightfall and the terrible fires burning without, where the Rings of Power could not outmatch that force asserting itself around their city, and between the continual impact of the sorcerously enhanced stones against the city's walls. Even as these impacts continued, masons and smiths, enhanced by the Rings they wore, were at work building a next wall, working against time and space and the malice of the star-flame.

Next time the Huorns came to avenge such fire-born horrors, vowed Sinmara, she would confront them with her own blade, and then they would see who was master to whom.

For now she inhaled the scent of her destruction and smelled within it the sour cooked-pork like odor of burning flesh, and the light of her fires caught in her eyes.

Let her armies besiege the city, they would not need her aid overmuch.

There were places to burn, and lesser Elven cities to sack.


	6. 'Oh Day Star, Daughter of the Morning'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Destiny's iron hand begins to reach out to snare the next generation of the Peredhils.

_The Elven settlement of Edhil-i-Aman:_

Celebrian's glare at Kemenrond was a harsh one, amplified by the anxieties the rest of her family and her people felt. 

"Mother has not fled here, why should we?"

Kemenrond's voice was weary with resignation.

"Your mother does not have the grip of fate against her."

Their gaze turned to their youngest child, still very much one. She hummed and ran, chasing a moth beneath the trees. Smoke intruded at the edge of their vision and the smell of burning and of chaos rippled outward.

"She does. I would spare Arwen that hand for as long as it can be."

Celebrian's gaze was level.

"If her fate truly is that of the Bane of the Gods...."

Kemenrond's gaze was sorrowful.

"Then hers will be a long and painful life of war and carnage. Should we not protect and guide our children as long as we can? Do they not deserve the chance to be children?"

Celebrian clicked her teeth.

"Very well."

Even then, as they moved to take the actions that they needed to take, a sound echoed around them. A low snarl, something unnatural. Not of the Children of Illuvatar but the Star-Blooded, the fell children of the old Star-Kindler of the North.

It dropped from the trees, a hulking thing that had once been a Quendi, now one of the Eldar. Its eyes shone with a dreadful light, teeth lengthened and fang-like. Foam was at the edge of its mouth and a strand of black blood dripped from its forehead. Its body was adorned in runes, for it was a shaman of star-magick, empowered by the Lady of the Nightfall. It landed with a semi-simian posture, its forelimbs colossal relative to its hind limbs, the guttural rasp of its voice audible.

"Kemedan, Kemrohir, over here, now!"

Kemenrond's voice echoed with a stark power that led the beast to snarl, and then its voice echoed with a guttural sound, a low intonation nothing of nature nor of its wills could create.

_**Mongrel bastards.** _

A stuttering hooming sound echoed, then, and it took them a few fatal seconds too long to grasp that this was what the thing called laughter when its runes glowed and it raised its right hand, swollen with gleaming veins and horrific burns on the back of its arm.

**_Now you burn!_ **

Arwen heard the noise, then, and ran to the side of her family and then the strangest things they had ever seen unfolded before them. Fire gathered around the creature's hands, a horrific droning sound echoing to a point that they fell to their knees. Arwen's older brothers and her parents were standing side by side....and then the fire that lanced for them guttered out completely around Arwen Arien's presence, as she stared bemused, her gaze uncomprehending.

"What?"

The creature growled, then, confused.

Then it leaned forward, its glowing eyes seeking to paralyze Arwen with its nature.

**_Abomination,_** it hissed, the Quenya perfectly enunciated, and then it leaped straight for Arwen, only to fall to the ground and to erupt in a terrible kind of flame that sang and sang greedily, for the Star-Kindler cared not from whom the blood flowed, so long as it flowed.

The very fires set in the nature of her servants became their undoing, and Arwen Arien was picked up by her family and they ran, then, to their horses.

By the time they fled a few of the Eldar found the charred corpse and skeleton of the sorcerer, and called to their Mistress.

Out of fire she manifested, her blade at her side, and then she knelt by the corpse dispassionately, picking up the bones and examining the nature of what flames must have been there.

Her nostrils flared, and though the city had seen the Peredhils flee and with them others, those who would be drawn to Rivendell in as it would rise to glory as the last Elven-realm of the western lands, there were those who remained when the Pale-Mare of Muspeldor arrived at the city's gates.

A volley of arrows were aimed at her and with a contemptuous scoff star-flame erupted with its droning nature that thickened the air around it and a shower of ash fell.

The monster raised Nightfall from its scabbard and the last sights the Elves had were of a being clad in golden armor adorned with occult fetishes moving with a blade that made a sound as of the dying of the Sun and Moon, and in a flash of light there was nothingness.

\------

Sinmara said nothing to her servants of why her Harrowing of the Elven-Realms was so brutal in this proximity, nor of what made her unleash the fires to begin to ring Ost-in-Edhil with that exacting thoroughness.

Only the wisest kept silent and knew there was something in the manner of the flames, and in memory.

\-----

In her camp she remained on a throne, her sword in its scabbard, the pointed edge digging deep into the ground. Her hand on the hilt, which gleamed with a mirror of her own magic. She had encountered an Elven-infant in the woods and her blade had failed. Now there was a corpse burned alive from its own flames.

She remembered the rumors of the prophecy, a child of the Lineage of the Peredhils who would be Bane to the Gods, and in whose presence the lands would become those of the Engwar.

When a sickly-seeming bird with glowing eyes and a featherless face that had drawn skin like a skull landed and spoke to her with the half-understood artes that she had gained from the force that had found something of a residence in her, her mood became still more wrathful.

**_Westernesse indeed._ **

She rose to her feet.

**_The woods burn and the fall of Ost-in-Edhil is but a matter of time and of its place._ **

**_Eregion is doomed to die, and we are the architects of its fall._ **

She inhaled the odor of the burning woods.

_**It is a manner of time and the harrying of the woods. So now I must wait. The spectres partially revealed shall reveal themselves in time to come.** _

From there she sat at her throne and gave orders and sent more of her ravens to spy out and to ensure that her Star-Blooded were indulging in the harrying.

The Stars hungered for blood and blood they would have.

Light blazed beside her, a low howl of nightmarish fury echoing, and she raised her eyes to it, smiling as if at an old friend.

**_Al-Debaran,_** she grinned.

The Maia nodded, her powers blazing with a spectral hue that illuminated elements of what was not quite flesh.

_**Milady Ilmare, successor to our Lady.** _

The Maia knelt, the sounds echoing in the burning wilderness around Ost-in-Edhil.

_**The last of the Elven monarchs, potentially, is somewhere in these woods, Al-Debaran. Go forth and find her. Bring me Artanis. Alive, if you can manage it, with as minimal harm as you can.** _

Sinmara smiled. 

**_After I have had my fun I intend to present to the Elves the skull of their last leader, and then where will they be? The High King is dead, and all that's left is a woman. And our forces may and have accepted the leadership of women, but theirs?_ **

Her face was lit with that same skeletal grin.

**_Find her._ **

Power echoed in its own resonances, Elven song's purity echoing with an aspect of the Music of Creation. Light blazed against the hellish false-light of the Stars, and her siege towers cracked and her armies closest to the city became as ashes and charred skeletons.

She rose to her feet.

_**The last Feanorian has seen fit to challenge me in a duel of magic. I am no Mairon, but I do not have to be. Do your task.** _

Al-Debaran grinned and then her light shifted as she became a being of towering darkness to mirror Sinmara's own, her eyes lit with a hellish red light. 

**_Galadriel won't be able to hide from me._ **


	7. Fire and Light:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Celebrimbor challenges Sinmara of Muspeldor to a sorcerer's duel. 
> 
> Al-Debaran begins her search for Artanis of Doriath. 
> 
> Tar-Minastir has unusual visitors.

_Throneroom of Ost-in-Edhil:_

Only one in the history of the Great Rings would be foolish, perhaps, or grand enough to seek to wear more than one at a time. Even Sinmara with her Ring did not seek to do so, though her Ring operated on a different kind of function than his, an extension of his idea taken down paths he never would have wished. He wore four Great Rings, two adorned with sapphires on his left hand, one of carnelian and of ruby on his right. Each of these enhanced his very being, permitting him to call upon the Music, the backdrop to all existence. It was not a power to wield lightly, but then neither was Nightfall. 

The dreadful blade and its wielder were burning his kingdom down around him. It had already laid low the High King, and only one remained who could lead them.

He was under no illusions of his own ultimate fate, though he hoped he could spare his son. Maglor should not be the only one of their House to remain in the Great Lands for all that would be or would ever be.

No illusions of his fate....yet he was in the end a son of the lineage of Feanor, son of Finwe, and to none in that lineage was it given to cower behind walls and yield to ease when monsters besieged their walls. His was the family that was not hit, it hit first, or at least hit back.

It would take much out of him to do this, but it would also buy Ost-in-Edhil time, rather than letting it wither before the starlight-sword.

He called upon great force with the Rings, his voice giving rise to the primordial Harmonics that had quite literally forged the universe. It was Quenya, not Valarin, for no Elf would speak so ugly and jarring a tongue as the language of the messengers of Eru. His harmonics echoed in a perfect rhyming element that worked with a power that was of more than mortal shape, amplified by the majestic element of his Rings.

Light shone outward, hallowed and with a purity loosely akin to that of the old Silmarilli, around which so much doom had interwoven with his family.

\-----

Before its gates, a being stood in golden armor, her rune-adorned blade not yet blazing into full strength. Her eyes shone with starlight and the air was thick around her presence, the howling drone of the stars something that at this level even her star-blooded could not endure. To be in her presence was to induce a wave of madness that devoured all around it, star-blooded and mortals tearing each other asunder and devouring flesh and rending bone. It became moreso when the loud incantation in Quenya, which drew upon the name and the power of the Kementari, of Melkor the Great King himself, and 'the hallowed and blessed voice of the Seven Winds' brought forth a dome of light that erupted outward. The less wise and wary of her subjects sought to charge the dome and paid the price for it, burned alive from within by the fires that were within them.

She willed her blade's fires to ignite, and the fire rippled along her blade like a liquid, the star-song _changed._ In the dawn-time it had shone with a terrible bass note of the primordial Song, a howl itself powerful enough to crack the ground with the very nature of its being. Sometime in the span between her creation of Muspeldor and that strange energy that had flowed her and given her a grasp, partially and incompletely, of all the spheres that were or could be, the sound of its fires had become other.

Now it was a Song akin to the footsteps of a Mumakil, something organic that almost seemed to whisper and to echo as the Stars did.

Its low and guttural element was not nearly as refined as the Quenya of a Feanorian, for in the hands of those who had codified dialects there was a subtlety even the most learned otherwise could not match.

Light, white and brilliant that seared lesser beings from within and sent their mutilated souls to the Void reached out for her as she moved her blade with her hands on the hilt above herself, the edge pointing downward.

When the dome reached her the sword Nightfall was slammed into it with a brutish force, no artistry in the motion.

Rival powers surged out in a contest of wills.

Another light flashed neither a mixture of energies nor a repulsion but the results of a _collision._

In a throneroom Celebrimbor was hurled against the wall near his throne with a force that led to an audible crunching and slid into unconsciousness, though he did not need to be conscious to maintain his wards, only alive. 

In the lines around the Siege, Sinmara of Muspeldor was picked up bodily and hurled through three of her burned trees and then carved a molten trench into the ground before finding herself for a moment lost to the simple exertions of her mortal flesh. Exhaustion reached up like the grasp of Gothmog in one of his more sour moods.

\-------

_She was in the Palace of Eternal Night, kneeling before the great throne. A withered being that bled starlight from wounds looked at her with feral eyes of madness, burned hands clutching the throne with familiar twitches, and a low huff of pain._

**_You are wasting your power, daughter. You play the general and humor the little vermin on its throne. You make the mistake I did in the War of Wrath._ **

**_We are not generals, daughter. We are GODS. By our will do the heavens know light_ ** _**and a chorus that shall endure until Father sees fit to 'redress my mistakes.'**_

_The hand that reached for her was skeletal-seeming and its fingers long and frail and seemingly bony. Light bled around its motions and the air hissed with the anticipation of the song._

_The burning, the burning where that hand gripped her face._

**_We are one in flesh and in soul. Did you think you could gain such power from me without a price?_ ** _  
_

_Then for a moment she saw something_ else _in that vision, a figure tall and terrible with burning orange eyes and a smile that matched her own._

\-------

She found out that she'd risen a few hours after her clash, but in that in the time of the explosion there had been a brief breach in the walls of Ost-in-Edhil. A few Jotnar and Eldar had broken into the city and gone on the rampage. Only a few, and the devastation wreaked did not quite justify the sheer power of what had created it. That opportunity had kept her armies from experiencing a temporary morale collapse given the sight, and for that she was grateful.

She remembered the words of the dream, and then she smiled, and under starlight walked to the fortifications and the breach that the Elves were seeking to heal (even as the wiser, with aid from Dwarves that had managed to sneak into the city before the Siege began, to build newer and smaller walls in the fullness of Elven and Dwarven labor, daring the shadows and the Starlight. Only the Sindar could endure that gaze besides the Naugrim, so it was Sindar who went out at night and then slept in the day and the Noldor who did things in reverse).

She raised her hands and then plasma began to condense itself into a sphere, as she remembered the Maws of the War of Wrath. How fascinating that the simple mechanical process of star-death could lead to so many....creative...options.

\-------

Al-Debaran had known only of Artanis of Doriath before being given her....orders. Orders, no less, from the old Queen's favorite. Ilmare the pampered, Ilmare the lapdog who'd spent the most time in their mistress's proximity and basked in her glories. She was pampered and favored because she was mightiest of all their kind, with only Olorin and Melian capable of matching her in raw force if they had had the strength to bear it. The Traitors had fled, one when he had grasped the nature of what starlight would become, the other after she'd made the first seven.

It rankled that with so many of them in the skies, able to retain the fullness of their splendor that their mistress had ordered them to remain here. There were projects they had begun. Sky-boats, like the Vingilot but worked to reflect the glories of the Star-Kindler. A fleet, vast and opulent. Ilmare waged a war for the world, the bulk of her kin took metal and the rocks that cluttered space and their own fires and hammered them into shapes of wonder. Jagged blades in the darkness that would catch and amplify the glory of starlight.

She had not mentioned them to Ilmare, figuring that if their mistress had spoken to them personally through her stars she knew.

She had almost wanted to thank her for the freedom from building this fleet that would remain in readiness until a day came when they would descend upon Arda and draw servants of the Light into the spheres they welcomed, to explore and to roam until Last Battle and Day of Doom.

She had not.

Instead she had nodded and now she was here, over the tattered and ice-covered ruins of the elder continent.

She had glimpsed element of their mistress at work and seen the changes. All of them in the heavens speculated on what they meant and what they were.

The Star-Kindler at her height had been a thing of splendor, the Night made manifest, light echoing with the purity of its song as she danced among her creations and taught them the Music of the Spheres.

Then there was the withered and feral _thing_ that had raved and wrought destruction and sunken into a madness that blazed with uncontrolled power.

The Lady of Light, turned into _that._

She vowed that whatever had overcome her mistress would not take her so easily as all that, and she was relieved to see that Ilmare had not changed....much. She had grown in height and in some immeasurable elements of power. 

If there were a reminder of the price of what it could be to unleash their inner fires in a wild sense, the dotted ice-coverd islands that were once Beleriand, with bones that seemed more rock than bone lingering, traces of fallen dragons and other eldritch things underscored it. Doriath was fallen long ago, and there was no trace of it. No trace of the Traitor's filthy mockery of their Lady's kingdom.

The Un-Light, the shadowy spidery goat-thing that had nested just outside Doriath was gone, too. She believed it dead, but even if it was not, none of its spawn were here.

It was a humbling sight, the legacy of a war of Gods. Beleriand had been a vast and sprawling lump of land, and now there was Ocean and there were Islands.

She shuddered, and turned to the south and the southeast.

If Doriath had fallen, where would the little maggots her mistress wanted dead go? Where would the last of the Elven royals go-

A thing as much blazing torch as hand slapped a face that was more a star than a face with a sound that blasted fire out and that fire lanced into the sand and the terrain around her. If she knew how to ask those questions, let alone answer them, she wouldn't be here, hovering over the frozen wasteland of a dead war.

This Elven land had arisen over centuries and it had arisen in a manner vast enough that even the Star-Blooded could not raze it all with the greatest will in Existence (not that they were necessarily wise enough or smart enough or determined enough to possess such a phantom even if it had occurred to them to do so).

She could sense Elven energy, which hummed with the Song in a manner too effeminate for her liking. High lilts that would be ethereal to mortals but were thin debased imitations of the true Music to her own. The Dwarves were low and sonorous like the great sea-beasts of Ulmo and Yavanna's collaboration, and they were not what she was searching for.

There was one thing that did trouble her, though. She could sense the Traitor's mongrel brood, most of them. A father, and two sons. But there was a Blank Spot that could not be sensed, a Darkness in her vision that was there and where she tried to focus on it she saw nothing. Her eyes ached if she tried to see the Unseeable. The mother, though.....

Her energy had a strange element to it. She had learned enough from her Lady of the various maggot-labels the little vermin used for each other. Vanyar, Noldor, Andor, Avari, Teleri. Khazad, the diverse tongues of the Engwar.

She could track Elven energy of the Vanyar in particular because it was brighter than others, reflecting an innate tie to the Deathless Land that was never lost nor dimmed in these so-called Great Lands.

Vanyar harmonics were rare here, and only one of them was married to the Traitor's brood.

Her lips parted in a sinister smile.

At last. A place to start her search, and a name to start it with.

\------

Tar-Minastir was troubled as he watched the ease with which Numenor had taken to the arts of war. He knew, as did all the royal family and the most elite nobility that there was Ainu blood in them. Ainu-blood of the very Ainu-tribe of the Eldagoth of the north, the dreadful Queen of the Palace of Eternal Night. 

So to see his people adjust so readily from trying to plant colonies in areas depopulated by Arda's existing wars and then the strange Burnings was one thing. To see them readily adjusting to war.....

Beyond this, there was the sudden silence from Hithlum. No Elven ships had come to the Land of the Star, and the _Palantiri_ were blind. He had sent voyagers east, to discover what, if anything was left behind.

In retrospect he would find the most disconcerting thing about the message and the messengers from the Lords of the West in that the very thing that was sent was vast enough to cast a shadow that darkened the day (which it was) but that it was only when it drew closer and the waves roared from the impact of those wings that its presence truly sank in.

It was massive, a six-legged beast of dark scales, obsidian-like in their gleam. Its eyes shone with the hallowed light of the Blessed Land, and its very passage seemed to smite the air.

Two figures were riding on its back and though they were puny next to its hulking size their presences too were stamped on the world. One a being of brilliant golden hue and armor of silver, wings unfurled in a grand fashion, his blade in its scabbard.

The other clad in dark armor, a lighter shade next to that of the great herald of the Great King, but only next to that.

His eyes shown with a warm golden light as well, his red hair trailing behind his helm.

The twin heralds, the champion of Valinor's swordsmanship....and the arch-mage, as humanity thought of him, the servant of Melkor was known.

Anacalagon was so massive that only the Meneltarma, barely, outweighed the sheer heft of his presence, and the dragon did not land, merely lowering its wing as the Ainur descended down its expanse, and remaining for a time hovering over Numenor.

It was a sight that would echo for generations, and laid the basis for tales that would endure into modern times. Jormugandr, the world-serpent, Typhon, father of monsters. The Orochi, the Cipatcli.

It endured thus and yet in the heat of the moment, there was the gravity of two beings, the one on the left removing his helm to show a face surprisingly human-like save for the golden eyes and the way the ears were pointed and extended out from the head in a way that the Quendi did not. The one on the right had no helm, and his face shone with a purity that was only visible to them because of a heritage kindred and yet distant.

Some element of them that was Vardarin saw the power of the Wind-Lord and fixated upon it, that power clear, and with it the beauty and the majestic strength of a heritage that shone like Arien's light. A face of perfect angles, and yet a hardened face for all that. One that had seen war and combat and knew them both intimately.

"My lords," he bowed.

It was Eonwe who did the talking, and it was the first of two messages that would leave grave concerns in Tar-Minastir's counsel as the preparations for war continued.


End file.
